


Being Human

by wormwood700



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 03:17:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12448569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wormwood700/pseuds/wormwood700
Summary: A weary traveller (Maglor) seeks shelter for the night at an inn in a wartorn land





	Being Human

He walks past the deserted battlefield and along the road into the valley. The ice-studded mud under his feet firms up as it gets colder and the night flows in between the low hills. He hopes there’ll be an inn waiting somewhere. 

Half an hour later, behind a bend in the road he sees lights peering out of the dark.

 

It’s an inn like hundreds of others fringing other roads. Drafty, smelling of food and sour smoke; the floor covered in a scattering of rickety tables shiny with beer-spill. He orders soup and strong beer from the woman behind the bar, who watches him in silence and somehow manages to convey she’s in charge.  He is exhausted and takes in nothing more than her outline.

 

He withdraws to a table near the fire and throws a glance around the room before he lights a cigarette and sinks his eyes into his drink.  The room is almost dark, and empty apart from him and two men in the corner who look like they’ve been there so long they’ve fused with the chairs they are sitting on. 

 

He finds intoxication a rough consolation, occasional sandpaper to blunt the sharp edges - the way men do. It’s a long time since he resisted the assimilation, the slow journey into being human.

 

This surrender, if he could call it that, was never a conscious decision taken at a definite moment in time; more a gradual realization that to let the human world brush him by like rain, touch only the surface of his skin did not make his exile any easier to bear. Instead it bleached the canvas of his existence, made the colours retract into a corner and sink into a deep pool of reminiscences, like pebbles. 

He began to settle on the outskirt of places where it felt right. He learned to make to himself as inconspicuous as he could - many found this presence disconcerting. Some however, were drawn to him, met his eyes in a crowd or when they walked by. 

And then there were the ones who made him slow his pace and stop. He never tried to identify what singled them out. He just knew, by a jolt in his spine, as if a hand latched on to it and tugged.

 

The woman walks over to him with a bowl of soup. He doesn’t notice her before the bowl is put down in front of him and nods a thank you without looking up. But when the expected sound of retreating feet doesn’t come, he lets his gaze move up along the stripes of her apron to her face. She looks down at him. Her eyes are dark and still, their real expression hiding far in, like pebbles in a pool.

 “Enjoy your soup, sir.”

He watches her as she walks towards the kitchen. Drink and cigarette smoke blur her outline, making it look as if she moves away from him through a water-filled tunnel. Her calm movements tune in with his heartbeats, in gentle oscillation - like a pendulum.

He lights another cigarette and blows smoke-rings towards the door that recently closed behind her. They form fleeting, spinning vortexes. In one of them a memory unfolds and looks him in the eye. A memory of another woman, who was all turmoil, and also moved...like a pendulum...

 

Riann sat in an open doorway the first time he saw her. Rocking backwards and forwards, keeping a steady rhythm, as if trapped inside her own circumference. Most people hurried past her with a mixture of embarrassment and indifference, but he stopped, his feet glued to the dusty, sun-baked ground of midsummer.  He took her in. Matted, red hair fell across her face and trailed down arms covered in cuts and scratch marks. 

She didn’t acknowledge his presence at first, but he continued to look at her until she angled her head back and he was able to catch her fluttering eyes and hold them inside his. After a while she stopped rocking, and let the hands she had clutched across a tear in her dress fall to her lap. The dress peeled apart, exposing protruding ribs and small breasts. He removed his jacket and put it across her shoulders. The big garment made her look diminutive, her face protruding pale and sharp out of the dark cloth. 

Few indeed would have called her beautiful, but beneath the detritus of neglect he sensed a spark; faint, flickering.

 This was his first inkling of the unpredictable nature of human beauty. Dwelling as possibility, biding its time, even if that time never came.

 

He didn’t so much heal her, as still the clamour inside her. She loved him for that silence. Sometimes, when old memories of pain and fire descended on him between midnight and dawn, she took his head in her hands and whispered: “Being with you is like sitting inside a shell, listening to the far roar of the sea.”

The first time he took out the harp and played for her she listened in alert silence. But the next time he did it, she unexpectedly slotted her voice into the music. Falteringly at first, but then she became bolder. Her voice hovered at the apex of each sound, balancing on the edge of disharmony before it let itself go. Clear water trickling over sharp, glittering stones.  

 

He had two years with her. The village accepted their union by ignoring its existence most of the time.  But when one day one of the village women praised him for his great charity he looked at her blankly. He knew nothing of charity. The peculiar human ability for self-observing goodness remained alien to him. 

 

She died in a fever that struck half the village down. In his grief he set fire to the small house they had shared. He watched it burn down, flame-roar and heat enveloping him like a shell. 

 

For a while he thought he might still become accustomed to mortality. He loved others, had children, spent a lifetime with them measured in their years. But his pain at their passing never altered, no matter how many he buried. Though he learned to recognize grief as the other side of love - for him there could never be one without the other. 

Sometimes he measured time in the roaming of his hand. Time was a millions touches wide, a thousand kisses deep.

 

The two men at the back of the room extract themselves from their chairs and shuffles unsteadily through the door and into the rain-stained night.

He closes his eyes and dozes off. When he returns to the room she stands in front of him.

“Are you staying the night, sir?”

“If I may.”

She nods and turns around to leave when he gestures for her to join him. She hesitates, then pulls out a chair and sits down. She pushes slim fingers through the wet, greasy film on the table, shoulders rigid. He makes no attempt to break the silence, just watches her and feels a quiver travel up his spine, down his arm and out to the tip of each finger. 

She looks to be in her mid forties, perhaps younger, perhaps older.  

After a while she looks up at him. She has an unusual face; fierce, attentive and finely lined. He meets her withdrawn gaze calmly.

“What brings you here?” she asks. “To this abandoned corner of the world, where the dead outnumber the living?

“I just walk the way my feet carry me.”

She accepts the answer without probing further.

“It’s rare in these parts to see a man with all four limbs intact.”

He says nothing. While watching her he has put both hands on the table, revealing the burnt hand he usually keeps hidden. The furrowed surface with charred skin wound tightly around knotted bone makes most people wince.

“That looks like a close call,” she says, her voice unsteady, 

She startles him when she stretches  her hand out and puts splayed fingers in the places his fingernails used to be. Her hand begins to shiver, but she keeps it where it is. 

The warm touch makes something inside him chime and vibrate. Soon the clamour is so loud that he wonders if she can hear it through the sound of falling rain.

“My husband died in the war,” she says, suddenly, “I think he got killed the moment he stumbled out on the battlefield. I always hoped his ineptitude would save him from the horrors that lay in store. In the months after I received the news I waited for pain to find me, but it never did. Instead I found that I enjoyed the silence he left behind. And my grief is now that twenty years of marriage left none. “

Her words barely reach him through the roar in his head, as if they are spoken from the other side of a waterfall. He struggles to keep his head upright.

She leans closer. Her face drawn.

“Your hand looks as if it was burnt in the fires of hell.  Are you perhaps a fallen angel at my table?” 

“They cut their wings off,” he says, more to himself than to her. “Pushed them off the precipice into darkness. Told them never to return to the gates of Heaven or Eden...”

He looks down at her fingers.

“My kind went across the sea many ages ago. I was told I could never follow. I don’t know if they still live there, across the sea...”

 

The windows shiver as they are hit by hard, ice-laced rain. He looks around the worn, smoke-filled room with its dying fire and back at the dark-eyed woman in front of him. She looks straight at him, her gaze no longer hiding far in. 

A pale recollection of white beaches and aquamarine walls flutters across his vision. He feels nothing at all at the memory. Instead he grabs her wrists, turns her hands gently upwards and puts his left cheek against her palms.

“Stay with me”, he whispers. He feels the tidal flow of her breath and closes his eyes like an expectant child. She leans forwards and kisses his hair. The chiming in his head recedes, like spume into sand.

She looks at the head resting in the valley of her palms. It feels fragile, a bone-receptacle that would shatter like eggshell if she pressed it too hard between her hands. Inside its thin walls she imagines the lives he has shared rolled up like tapestries. Lifetimes begun and ended without her.

She looks at his matted hair, nicotine-stained fingers, the wave marks etched across his forehead. She has stilled something in this worn stranger, conjured up a moment of silence for him to rest inside. If she breathes slowly maybe she can make it last. Prevent the pendulum from moving; contain it forever in this dark room, while the glasses reflect the last of the fire.

 

 

 

 


End file.
